War Criminals by Gavin Smith (ereader for textbooks .TXT) 📕

Chapter 13

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ The fact that her dad was swearing, let alone at her, admittedly over the comms, illustrated just how frightened he’d been.

‘Got kidnapped, escaped again, it was a thing,’ Miska told him. She’d used her engine to get into the correct orbit around Ephesus for Waterloo Station but then run silent and cold on the approach. She was relying on the Little Jimmy’s superior stealth systems to prevent her having to explain the presence of the stolen NSA ship in Epsilon Eridani space. She didn’t care how liberal the ‘authorities’ were. Besides, as far as she knew the Teten was still in-system.

This is your life now, she thought as she used the compressed gas manoeuvring thrusters to invert the Little Jimmy as it came in beneath the Daughter’s superstructure and docked with one of the underside maintenance airlocks.

‘What kind of answer is that?’ her dad demanded.

‘Bounty hunters,’ she told him, wondering where Vido was. She quickly explained what had happened.

‘You want to go after them?’ he asked.

Yes, she thought, but although the Daughter outgunned the Sneaky Bitch, the corsair was faster and more manoeuvrable, and the prison barge wasn’t really set up for pirate interdiction.

‘No,’ she told her dad, ‘but we see that ship again we shoot first and ask questions later, I don’t care who her boyfriend is. Did we get everyone off-world and back to the ship?’

‘Yes, pretty much everyone’s back in their pods. Except the Ultra and his people.’ Oddly, for matters pertaining to the Ultra, her dad didn’t sound as though he disapproved.

‘I don’t like him, his people, or his methods, but I think you were right to put someone down on the ground. Depending on what you want to do here, we need intel,’ he told her.

Miska spun round in the bucket seat in the Little Jimmy’s cockpit and looked at the airlock hatch on the floor of the ship. She should probably trance in to Camp Reisman and talk to her dad and Uncle V but being electrified into unconsciousness wasn’t the same as getting sleep and she was dog-tired.

‘Nyukuti?’ she asked.

‘Came back, when he came to. I think they left him in the street. He was a bit banged up but none the worse for wear.’

‘Nothing back from the war crimes investigation?’ she asked.

‘No, Vido thinks that Triple S will be doing everything they can to slow it down.’

‘Is Vido getting some rest?’ she asked. He had sounded desperately like he’d needed it the last time she had spoken to him.

‘Er …’ her dad said. Miska frowned. Then she ran his image through the projector in the cockpit. He became a twelve-inch hologram stood atop the main console.

‘What?’ she asked. Then she remembered New Sun’s offer to remove the N-bombs. ‘Did he desert?’ she asked, dreading the answer. A blinking link to a news viz appeared in her IVD. ‘I’m not going to like this, am I?’

Her dad didn’t answer.

She opened the link.

‘… no sexual abuse among the Legion. Colonel Corbin made it absolutely clear from the first that she would not tolerate sexual violence in any form when she killed all the sex offenders, and anyone who’d ever hurt a child.’

Vido was in the same real-world studio, being interviewed by the same media clone as Campbell and Hinton had been.

‘I see. And the allegations that she has sexual relations with many of the prisoners and the virtual ghost of her father?’

Miska hadn’t heard that one. Her breath caught in her throat. Her hands bunched into fists. She glanced at her father’s hologram, he was stony faced but she knew him well enough to know he was seething.

‘Utter nonsense,’ Vido told her.

‘But the electronic recording of her father is a tyrannical force within the virtual environment where the convicts’ minds are imprisoned.’

‘Only in so much as he’s a marine sergeant major, so what do you expect? A fairy godmother?’

‘But you’re slaves kept in line with explosives in your heads?’

‘We’re prisoners, a penal legion in the truest sense of the world, but active duty is for volunteers only. The bombs in our heads are our prison while we’re working.’ He leaned forward. ‘They’re to protect people like you. They’re to protect the likes of people who spread horrible lies from the consequences of coming face to face with the victims of their propaganda. The thing I don’t get is why you feel the need to make up stories, we’re a pretty colourful bunch.’

For a moment, the media clone looked decidedly uncomfortable.

‘You were a member of the Cofino crime family, weren’t you?’ she asked, changing the subject.

‘Obviously I’m not going to discuss that,’ he told her. ‘But let me say this. I ended up on the Hangman’s Daughter because of cause and effect. Imagine if the people who invented and disseminated such lies were subject to cause and effect.’

‘Mr Cofino, please, Corporal Corbin …’

‘Colonel,’ Vido corrected her.

‘Colonel Corbin attacked the gas mining platform with some of the most horrific criminals on board the infamous Hangman’s Daughter. Do you honestly expect people to believe that they didn’t commit those atrocities? Your blaming of Triple S smacks of a conspiracy theory.’

‘We expect people to believe the result of the evidence from the UN’s investigation that New Sun is trying so hard to suppress at the moment. And we’re hoping that media organisations, even those who have received contributions from PR agencies tied to New Sun,’ he said with some significance, ‘will report those results with the minimum of spin.’

‘But Miska Corbin is a psychopath,’ the interviewer insisted.

‘Undoubtedly, but she’s a lot of fun,’ Uncle V told her. ‘Many of us have done monstrous things, but we’re not all monsters, and those of us that are, are on a pretty tight leash.’

‘Until someone tells lies about you?’ The way the interviewer said it made it sound like she’d gone off-script. Miska suspected she was scared. That pleased Miska, Vido was right, there should be consequences for talking shit about